It’s been over a year since Urban City Pack has released and has continued to be our bestseller. Luckily, we have not abandoned this pack. It’s been on our mind.. it haunts us as night.. it’s the crying baby screaming “update me!” and just needs a bit of TLC.

We have been gathering a ton of feedback and now have a gameplan on how to tackle a major update for this pack! There are lots of features we have been adding to our newer packs like Medieval Village and Industrial City that make Urban City look outdated.

Here’s a quick summary of some things we have been tackling the past few weeks to give this pack longevity:

common scale pass on all assets

material pass

interiors! our biggest request and we have delivered 🙂

hyper-modular and level modular pieces

transparent windows to see those beautiful interiors now

addition of new signage (street, store fronts

Having to universally scale everything up or down to match a third person character size caused quite a bit of issues for the buildings. Modular/hyper-modular pieces ended up being off the grid and not match anything to the power of 2. Luckily with Unreal’s vertex snapping we were able to find a middleground solution that made it work. Another thing we are trying to sort out is a transparency issue on the windows. Since the concrete is connected to the window texture, the glass part has to be see through but this causes the concrete window sill to be see through as well.

We have a laundry list of other things we plan to tackle that will be announced once they’re started. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the work we’ve been doing. Everything is still work in progress.

Screenshots

Doing a quick test to see transprancy on the windows and into the interiors. We think this really adds depth to the buildings and more life. One thing we did to the municipality building was add more geometry to the exterior giving it a bit more “pop”

Currently our windows are using an emissive texture to fake lighting in the windows. With proper window and interiors, you would be able to add an actual light inside and help sell the realism of your level.

Shot of our interior shells, we’re looking into finding a good way to add interior walls but haven’t figured out the best solution just yet.

Added a lot more corner pieces to make sure everything snaps together perfectly. We spent a lot of time cleaning up the hyper modular pieces. Once we scaled things properly, we noticed a lot of cracks on the walls and no corner pieces. We used a dirty trick to create them before by intersecting side walls together.

Inside of the hyper modular walls

Now that doors/interiors are enter-able, we had to thicken them and make sure they are two sided. We also modeled in a bit more detail such as the door handles since the player will walk right up to them now.

Some new materials we have been playing around with. Higher resolution walls, ceilings, ground textures for the buildings. Most of the textures in the current pack are 1024×1024 so we felt it wouldn’t hold up in the future.

Work in progress for some street signs being added to the pack. We felt like it’s a standard in most urban cities so it was a must add.

Details up close! We used a height map mixed with a metallic map to give it that reflective look. The finer bumpy details come from a height map

That’s all for now! All these fixes and new content will really add a breath of fresh air to this outdated pack. We will have more updates as this pack continues to be worked on.

PolyPixel is back with another new pack named Medieval Docks! We’re continuing with the Medieval theme after releasing Medieval Village last month.

This pack has a darker theme featuring grungier assets, thatched roofs, and more dead foliage.

WHAT IS THIS PACK?

While Medieval Village featured more of a booming area, Medieval Docks takes a step towards the shorelines where trades, farmers and boats reside.

It has a darker tone with grungier props, houses, and dock areas. The surrounding vegetation follows the theme with more dead branches, autumn type trees, and tall grass. Something we haven’t seen in most other packs are BOATS! We provided a few variations to help populate the shoreline.

The docks and foundation walls are all modular so users can mixand match to create a large shoreline area. There’s still lots to do but we feel the packhas a great tone and atmosphere already.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE SO FAR?

greyblock and nailed down scale of demo level

set atmosphere and tone of pack

great start on the foliage

created modular docks and foundation parts

first pass of houses

first pass on boats

WHAT DO YOU PLAN TO MAKE?

polish/optimize the trees

add VFX & Audio to breath that extra bit of life into the world

bit more variation in houses

optimize scene with LODs, occluders, etc.

populate marketplace area

These are early shots made in Unreal Engine 4. Enjoy!

Screenshots

This should be released on our own store sometime in October and Unreal Marketplace & Unity Asset Store in November.

Welcome to our very first developer spotlight! I love when we get emails about developer’s having great success using our packages and seeing all our stuff in their game. Jago came to me excited and announced his game Sniper Blacklist had been greenlit on Steam.

Sniper Blacklist is a third person action/adventure game in an open world setting. Long range shooting is the main feature of the gameplay.

My main objective when I develop the game is to give the players the real sensation of a sniper. patience, precision, orientation and training will be your best asset! – Jago

Video Demo:

Our team was excited to see our demo level from our Lake Side Cabin pack being utilized for something more than just a promo shot. Jago and his team were smart to quickly prototype their gameplay in a pre-made level to see how things would play out in a finished presentation. It looks absolutely amazing!

Screenshots

Stories like these keeps our team motivated to keep making great products for indie developers. Sniper Blacklist should have a kickstarter very soon so please go out and support this!

LOD (level of detail) states for trees & props – allows for a more streamlined game that doesn’t bog down from a distance

Complete Support & Documentation – we make sure we update and support our products with quick email support and full documentation

Demos & Speed Level Test

Screenshots:

Modular & Hyper Modular Buildings

We’ve been listening to a lot of feedback from our previous products and customers want more customization. They love our quality of work but some of our assets lack the ability to create something that is truly unique in a game developer’s level. We believe the marriage of both modular & hyper modular pieces is the answer to create thousands of variations.

High Quality & Quantity of Props

We spent an extra two weeks on this pack to build out the necessary props needed to make a medieval village level. However, our prop artists still spent the same amount of time creating each individual prop keeping the AAA quality we’re known for. One fun thing our team did after creating the initial set of props is ask ourselves “what else can this prop be?” A rice grain sack could become a closed sack, a 4 person table could be turned into a smaller 2 person table, etc. These simple variations allows the user to mix & match even more props without wasting more texture memory.

Optimize, Optimize & Optimize

This is our biggest pack we have ever created yet it runs the smoothest! Optimizations such as LODs, occluders, compacted maps to save on memory, and clean shaders should ensure your game will run smoothly even with a large amount of assets.

This is one of the only times we have released a pack with COMPLETE CONFIDENCE this is all we could have done. We went 2 weeks past our scheduled release date to make sure we gave everything we got.

Hopefully others can enjoy this pack as much as we had creating it.

For now, you can purchase the Unreal Package & Source Package on our store

It’s been almost a year since we started content creation on the Unreal Marketplace & Unity Asset Store. We’ve learnt so much in every aspect – from what customers want, to improving quality in our art packages.

Looking back at our very first pack CountrySide, we hate to admit that it looks mediocre. It didn’t live up to the PolyPixel name and we had to do something about it.

CountrySide V1.0 Screenshots

As you can see the tree quality was not good, the rest of the assets looked mediocre but not close to anything we have done in the last 3-4 packs.

Forum posts and reviews mentioned again and again the low quality of the trees & vegetation and it didn’t settle well with us. We felt like we cheated our customers of the potential of a high quality art pack and knew we had to do something about it.

Our team sat down and made a laundry list of things to do. Here’s what we ended up fixing:

Version 2.0 Improvements:

Added 40 new trees

Improved global foliage material

Re-textured stone wall

Remade terrain material

Remade terrain textures

New demo scene

Added creek

Re-textured rocks

Added dozens of new flowers, weeds and grass

Added nature ambient sounds

Fixed legacy terrain

We just finished up LakeSide Cabin, our new nature environment pack, and learned a ton of new stuff on how to make better trees, ground plants, and rendering/lighting. This was the perfect time to update Countryside while we had momentum.

CountrySide V2.0 Screenshots

The quality has been improved drastically compared to what it was a year ago. It was a great project for us to tackle as we’re able to see the growth in our artists and company over that time. But most important is being able to deliver a product our clients deserve.

We appreciate you, as our customer, giving us honest feedback even if it’s not always positive. It lets us know what’s working and what needs fixing. In the case of CountrySide, we listened to your comments and hopefully delivered with these major improvements. CountrySide V2.0 is our promise to you that we do not abandon our packs.

Here’s an in-depth video done by two of our artists Cody & Jonny showcasing everything that will be included with this 3D Nature Environment Pack. We decided to have two people in the video to add a bit more life and keeps Cody from rambling on all the time. Hope you guys enjoy!

Here’s a first sneak peek at our next pack! We’re taking a step back from Environments and letting our zen mode kick in with a nature pack.

We recently took a summer trip to our backyard up in Northern B.C. Canada. Seeing the beautiful mountains and trees inspired us to create this Lakeside Cabin pack.

WHAT IS THIS PACK?

This pack is our coniferous nature environment inspired by the backyard of Pacific NorthWest Rocky Mountains.

We want to give our users enough pieces to build a large scenic environment..boulders, trees, different ground plants, dock area, & terrain shaders. Our goal is to create a massive world that looks great and have it all running smooth at 60fps.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE SO FAR?

lots of rawks!

most trees integrated

world machine terrain

built most of the man made props

Added a handful of ambient sounds to bring the world to life

WHAT DO YOU PLAN TO MAKE?

Polish/optimize the trees

Get terrain working 100% and looking great

Add VFX to breath that extra bit of life into the world

Bushes Bushes Bushes

These are early shots made in Unreal Engine 4. Enjoy!

Continuing with our Zen Mode, here’s a time lapse of one of our artist building the scene in Unreal Engine 4. The music and work really puts me in a relaxing mood!

Hello everyone! This is a huge update and we’re excited to share things with you. The pack is ready and has been submitted to Unreal to go onto the trello board.

Our team couldn’t be happier with how this pack turned out. We believe this is our best looking product and hope to continue to keep up this quality. Thanks for reading and please take a second to leave a comment.

WHAT IS NEW?

Last update we noted that we had all our assets into a greblock stage. Everything is now finished the with proper materials, LODs, Collisions.

When we built out our asset list for Post Apocalyptic World, we said to ourselves “no way this all gets done”. Our team proved us wrong by working hard and efficiently and got way more than we could have imagined. We believe we tackled the big items and hit home runs with quantity AND quality.

WHAT IS OUR PROCESS?

We’ve been trying to think in terms of how a customer might use the pack and how we can build out our assets to make it as easy as possible for them. One new method we’ve been trying is building out speed levels to see how all our assets would work if someone were to build out a level from scratch.

Here’s the video below of our test:

One problem we had before was trying to add too much tech into our packs. This took away from our art and created more technical issues than us providing high quality art.

We understand that our customers may not come from an art background so anything that feels too technical or art related, we’ve tried to simplify it

Screenshots:

WHAT IS LEFT TO DO?

With Unreal Engine 4 out of the way, we now need to apply the same treatment to Unity. With Unity 5 things are much more similar to UE4, but there’s still quite a bit of differences that have their own headaches. We have our own in-house tools to make processes easier but like any art the Unity pack needs its own TLC. Stay tuned for the next post about our Unity updates!